Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

But in fact I don’t remember thinking about anything very hard that day. What I remember is drifting further and further into that zone I’ve explained so badly. Near dusk I went for a long walk in spite of the heat—all the way out to where Lane Forty-two joins the highway. Coming back I stopped on the edge of Tidwell’s Meadow, watching the light fade out of the sky and listening to thunder rumble somewhere over New Hampshire. Once more there was that sense of how thin reality was, not just here but everywhere; how it was stretched like skin over the blood and tissue of a body we can never know clearly in this life. I looked at trees and saw arms; I looked at bushes and saw faces. Ghosts, Mattie had said. Ghosts with cold breath. Time was also thin, it seemed to me. Kyra and I had really been at the Fryeburg Fair—some version of it, anyway; we had really visited the year 1900. And at the foot of the meadow the Red-Tops were almost there now, as they once had been, in their neat little cabins. I could almost hear the sound of their guitars, the murmur of their voices and laughter; I could almost see the gleam of their lanterns and smell their beef and pork frying. “Say baby, do you remember me?” one of her songs went, “Well I ain’t your honey like I used to be.”